Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

The Fourth of July

Even when Star Trek was bad, it could have moments that were memorable and said something important. In the deeply-flawed episode “The Omega Glory”, descendants of early Earth colonists (or else the inhabitants of an impossibly-parallel world) fought a bacteriological war between Americans and Chinese which ended in both nations being hurled back into barbarism; the Yangs (Yankees) still have an American flag and a copy of the Constitution, but have forgotten the real meaning of the artifacts. They revere the flag as a totem and recite the “holy words” by rote; today’s epigram is the Yang leader’s rendition of the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution (“We the People, in order to form a more perfect union…”) altered by centuries of repetition without meaning. They live in a tribal culture ruled by chiefs and elders, practice trial by combat, and adhere to a code of religious law completely at odds with the sacred documents they can no longer read. To them, “freedom” is nothing but a “worship word” forbidden to infidels, and the Constitution is taboo for the eyes of anyone but a chief.

The situation presents a useful (if exaggerated) metaphor of modern America; though we have not descended to the barbarism of the Yangs, our law and traditions have drifted ever further from their philosophical and constitutional moorings. The Founding Fathers would not recognize the current legal code of this country, grounded as it is in religion and other dangerous superstitions and “-isms” inimical to the Enlightenment philosophy and thousand-year-old English common law tradition in which it was originally based. Our chiefs and priests of the law claim to revere the Constitution yet violate it at every turn; their sycophantic followers proclaim that interpretation of the “holies” is only for the elite, and rabble like us need merely obey “just authority”. And though “freedom” is still a “worship word” in this country, observing the ovine obsequiousness with which Americans submit to looting, brutality, sexual molestation and demands of literal obeisance to petty officials leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that they have as little understanding of its meaning as the fictional Cloud William did. The title of today’s column is the name by which most Americans refer to this day: not “Independence Day” to acknowledge the actual reason for the observance (a declaration by brave and principled men that they refused to submit to tyranny), but rather just a date on a calendar, an excuse to stay home from work and celebrate their dependence on the overlords who so graciously grant them the holiday.

The oath Cloud William called the Ay Pledgli ends with the words, “…with liberty and justice for all,” and the pairing is not an arbitrary one: liberty and justice are inextricably bound together, and the only way to guarantee the one is to protect the other. When government actors are not only given greater rights and greater legal standing than other citizens, but are in fact insulated from the consequences of their own evil actions against others, the liberty of ordinary citizens becomes subject to the whims of those officials and justice dies. And when individuals, groups or institutions are allowed to commit injustices against others, how can the liberty of those so victimized survive? In trying to explain to the Yangs what their “holy words” really meant, Captain Kirk said, “That which you call Ee’d Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people…not…only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well…they must apply to everyone or they mean nothing!” Sometime in the past two centuries, Americans forgot that; individuals and groups used government as a means to deny liberty and justice to others, and thus created the machinery by which their own liberty was stolen. In the real world, there aren’t any wise heroes from outer space to come down and rescue us from our own decadence by explaining the meaning of our sacred truths; we’re going to have to rediscover them for ourselves, without assistance from the stars. Liberty is both a blessing and a burden; justice is both a boon and a solemn duty. And if we continue to abdicate responsibility for both to the least evolved and most barbaric among us, we won’t need a world war to destroy everything our ancestors built.

Related

25 Responses

Hi Maggie,
it is appropriate that you post this today. And to show you how bad it is getting in english speaking lands. Roger Hayes, the head of the British Constitution Group, was unlawfully kidnapped and unlawfully incarcerated this week.

In the land that is the home of the Magna Carta unilaterial unlawful arrests and incarceration followed by a wall of silence from the criminals in the police and judiciary is an abomination.

No matter WHO is the victim of a crime they have a RIGHT to the protection of law.

Here is Walter Cronkite saying “I’m Glad To Sit On The Right Hand Of Satan”.

And you have to love “firstly some of us americans are going to have to yield up some of our sovereignty”

When you know the agenda of those who enslave us and know how they use words to lie and manipulate then the whole rotting carcase of the legal system is exposed for what it is….a criminal cartel.

Notice Cronkite freely interchanges “legislation” and “law”. Notice he talks about “enforceable world law” and does NOT talk about “the protection of law”. There can be no “force” in law, meaning natural law. All there is in natural law is protection and choice. At no time does ANY force occur under Natural Law.

The ultimate sanction for someone who does not agree to abide by Natural Law is to kill that person. This is an act that is carried out OUTSIDE the protection of Natural Law and can only be carried out of the person have VOLUNTARILY CHOSEN to live outside the protection of Natural Law.

These topics deserve open debate. But the debate is suppressed time and time again. It is a shame that the MRA-MRM area will NOT discuss these issues. I know Gorbachev watches this blog. Perhaps those MRAs who are smart enough to read your blog will be smart enough to know that discussing these issues are very important.

I’ve found though, like virtue, although people honor freedom in speech, most of them are terrified of it in practice. A sad truth about humanity is that most of us want someone else to take the responsibility of telling us what to do. It almost seems that the form of organization most natural to humans is the king- And even when we most purposefully don’t have one, we strive to create one.

For most of my life, I enjoyed way more freedom than most people, and once you have that, it’s really painful to give it up.

The drive for tyranny goes arm in arm with the drive for security, which you wrote about the other day. You get the former while chasing a dream of the latter.

Wow. Not one of your longer posts, but a powerful one. I think that one pic just became my favorite girl/girl kiss.

Here’s another pairing every American is familiar with: “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Well, are we brave enough to be free? Until we stop abdicating our freedoms out of fear, we should stop singing those words.

Well, this post doesn’t make any sense in the context of that one book you talked, A Renegade History of the United States. It again, portrays the founding fathers as only wanting liberty as long as it was freedom to be good worker-bee protestants who only cared about contributing as much as they possibly could to society.

But of course it does. The Founding Fathers were human beings, not demigods; they were flawed and saw things through their own eyes as everyone does. But the difference between them and modern leaders is that they recognized that they were like that, and voluntarily shackled themselves so they couldn’t easily impose their own prejudices and flawed judgments on others.

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” – Alexander Hamilton

“What more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more … a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” – Thomas Jefferson

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” – James Madison

These truths are obvious to moral people who understand that each individual belongs to himself; they are only difficult for those who believe they have the right to decide for others what they should do, say, think, eat, wear, believe and be.

The Founding Fathers believed that every man had the right to control himself, but many of them undoubtedly believed that given free choice and education, most people would come to agree with their sense of morality. The fact that they did believe this, yet established a system which could not force it to happen, is a testament to their morality. Do you understand? The one does not exclude the other because the world isn’t black and white, right and wrong. The Founders’ flaws do not negate their wisdom in establishing a limited government, but rather confirm it.

The founding father also had the advantage that most modern American do not: They knew their European history. They knew full well about the terrible waste, carnage, and hatred that religious wars had spread in Europe, and they knew that mandating any sort of governmental support for an official religion would cause the same here.

Another point that I really have to bring up is how this post isn’t far removed from socialism.

What most people don’t realize is that socialism as it is currently understood is a horrific abomination made from the defiled corpse of actual socialism.

Of course, it’s arguable that since socialism has never been to into practices as envisioned by it’s advocates that maybe socialism just doesn’t work and can’t be put into practice.
That would work for mainstream political debates, but not so much for libertarians, because of that whole “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” thing. It would make debating libertarians much easier if I could just point out people have tried libertarian principles and they don’t work.

Now, because of the distortion of history by the Soviet Union and the welfare state, the majority of thought on socialism is completely out of line with what it actually is and we must limit our analysis of socialism and communism to the first few principles rather than the details or historical actions. While annoying, given that libertarianism is regard as little more than corporate shrills, I must protest the unwillingness of libertarians to understand the blight of the socialist.

. Socialism is a philosophy of individual liberty. It differs from libertarianism in the way it tries to maximize personal liberty. Libertarianism believes that the best way to maximize it is to target the chief tool of the strong use to control the weak, the government.

Socialism, however is an older philosophy that originated in the industrial revolution, where the difference between the “Robber Barons” and actual feudal Barons, was very small. People who had money not from earning but because they inherited rent producing property from ancestor who either stole it from people or were award it for performing violence against people who didn’t think the king actually got his power from divinity.

The fundamental problem that socialist have with the current system is that too much power rests with people who didn’t do anything to earn it. They believe in something called Rentier capitalism, where these people that they call capitalists, but in less socialist terms are basically the people investment bankers work for. Socialism holds that earning money not from personal actions or work but rather from possession of things that make money is wrong.

This is very similar to the idea in libertarianism that people own property because they put work into improving those things. Socialists find that simply giving an initial investment of cash is not enough to justify being forever entitled to money from the improvement and production of whatever was invested in.

For example, imagine that a very small and poorly managed company with a really great idea exchanges a quarter ownership stake in the company for fifty buck in pizza. Now imagine that the idea is that retarded infinite energy machine from atlas shrugged and that John Galt is hired to manage the company, makes a small but vital improvement to the machine that was only possible through his own hard worker and brilliance. Well the guy who gave the pizza comes in after the company has changed the world and demands 25 percent of everything. The police come in, initiate force against everybody and take 25% and give it to the pizza guy. John Galt gets paid a salary that, by definition is less than than the actual value of the labor he put into the company.

That’s the socialist version of Atlas Shrugged and while it’s very inaccurate and would never happen in the real world, it is again Atlas Shrugged.

So, socialism has two issues with the world which are, in fact very similar to that of libertarianism, first that too much power is in the hands of people that don’t work for a living and that people aren’t earning the “sweat of their brow”

Libertarianism is a form of neosocialism where Libertarians recognize that while wealth is still in the hands of the elite, power and force is been centralized in the government. Remember that in the medieval and renaissance period, a considerable percentage of armed thugs answered to the nobility rather than being regarding themselves as servants of abstract government principle. Thus, the “strong” could turn to their own personal armies to oppress people, rather than being forced to use government thugs and bullies.
Libertarians believe in a complicated and diverse number of things and assigning one central belief to them is wrong. However the core belief of the majority is the idea of limiting government interference in things and preventing governments from using force against innocent people. As you’ve pointed out, this is stop the “strong” from having a source of thugs to hurt people with.

Socialism is not about big government. And if you’ve actually gotten to this point, Maggie, I’d like to once again express my admiration for your willingness to examine other people viewpoints and tolerance for other people’s opinions. How’s the weather, I’m in south central Idaho, and the weather is the whackiest thing, because South Central Idaho is actually a giant desert in terms of rainfall and heat, so summers are horrible but the winters are still really bad because of how far north it is. But back to socialism.
Socialism doesn’t like the government and it doesn’t believe in progressive taxation and even welfare, really. They believe, like libertarianism that the need for these things are due to market distortions. and believe that in a world where the means of production are owned by the people who use them everything will be super cheap.

The means of production is simply property that makes money and in many ways socialism is an attempt to apply agrarian land reform to machine tools and trains.

I can think of no better refutation of the idea that communism favors punitive taxes that the fact that communism believes in creating a classless, stateless society where there will be no taxes at all.

So why is an “ism” that is even more anarchistic than most libertarians regarded as being all about big government.
That because of something called Leninism and the idea of the vanguard party. Lenin wanted to create a socialist state in Russia, but Russia at the time was a feudal state with any of the industry going on that Marx thought was necessary to cause a socialist thing to happen. It’s one of the few brushes with reality that socialism has.

Lenin looked at this problem and thought the solution was to violently overthrow the Russian Empire and establish a dictatorship that would industrialize Russia and then, when everybody was working in a factory, quietly hand power off to the true communism and go quietly in the shadows. That didn’t happen, of course and Stalin, his successor and Lenin himself, were little more than dictators who liked messing with the agricultural business a lot, thus resulting in some of the largest democides in history.
Indeed, The USSR was pretty much a dictatorship, that looked like a dictatorship, acted like one, and worked like one, but called itself the next step to the creation of a stateless society.

The other big government idea thought of as socialism is the welfare state, which originated from two different traditions of bribing people to not be socialists. One was developed by Otto Bismark as a way to keep the workers from revolting by giving them access to high quality health care and pensions for cheap. The other was the Swedish model, and I know what sex work advocates thing about Sweden, but the Swedish welfare state was the result of a comprise between the trade unions and businesses.

According to Accelerationism, this is bad because it makes capitalism work longer and accelerationists should try to end capitalism as quickly as possible.
Accelerationism is like a libertarian voting for Obama so when the big government policies of the supposed left-right parties fail, the backlash is toward big government and not the principle of individual liberty.

Also, on the lighter side, I’ve been thinking about Warhammer in the context of it being a fictionalization of the struggles of Christianity and Paganism and I realized that something that didn’t make any sense in Warhammer any more. That blood is typically connected with women due to child birth and menstruation and correlated blood with violence as in the Warhammer 40k universe is pure nonsense.

You see menstruation causes a woman to lose about 35 milliliters of blood per cycle. That’s not a lot, but the human body only holds a mere five liters. Thus only 143 menstruation cycles are needed to surpass the amount of blood produced by murdering someone. And as the ratio of women to murders needs to be considerably higher than 1:1, the largest amount of blood produced in the universe must be from menstruating women.

Therefore, correlating blood with violence is baseless, and the obsession with blood by groups like the Blood Ravens makes no sense because it represents female sexuality. And the blood good really should be a blood goddess. And something like the bloodthirster, a giant demon, doesn’t make any sense unless it actually spends most its time asking women if it can down on them on their periods.

And I’m no longer able to think of the World Eaters as being anything other than what guys would be like if they went through menstruation cramps.

Sorry brah – I try to be respectful and all … but you repeatedly take the issues past whatever topic Maggie’s post is about and into the realm of Libertarian-hating. We get it man – we’re all neomarxist, neofascists who are only a degree of separation from being outright socialists.

We get it dude.

So why post on it any more?

Tell the truth – the above was nothing but psycho-babble to me. You clearly seem to know all of the arguments against socialism (not that that is a great accomplishment in this day and age) but you don’t know anything about libertarianism.

I would make a long post pointing out why – and in the past I kind of have. But it would be waste wouldn’t it?

No problem, I’m just working stuff out for myself and I just wanted to share some of it with you guys. And it was probably abrasive too. But I’m not doing this to be mean, I do pay attention to what libertarians shared with me.

“I would make a long post pointing out why – and in the past I kind of have. But it would be waste wouldn’t it?”

My Lord is indeed a paragon of wisdom and restraint! These are my own thoughts before typing out 95% of the possible posts I might make on the Internet. They have saved me from a great deal of grief, and my keyboard from the loss of its f, g, h, v, and b keys.

“It would make debating libertarians much easier if I could just point out people have tried libertarian principles and they don’t work.”

Sir, one questions why you debate libertarians at all when you admit they favor the implementation of a novel experiment which has yet been tried. Does not a sensible attitude support experimentation as the means by which such ideas are ultimately tested? If you believe libertarianism will fail, then by all means you should encourage the implementation of libertarian ideologies, (preferably somewhere else, perhaps) as this and only this would actually demonstrate its flaws.

I will add that, for me, one of the most attractive features of libertarianism is that it is so unpopular. The scum and dross who are mainstream in humanity have never bothered to make it their own. Thus, it remains pristine! Were libertarian notions to gain popularity, I can only assume they would result in utter catastrophe, because man is worthless and regardless of the social order can only suffer under the shackles of his own stupidity.

I’ve posted about the type of libertarian I often encounter. I meet a whole heluvalot more of this sort than the sort which Maggie represents. You may well conclude that THIS is what happens when libertarianism becomes popular: it loses most of what was attractive about it in the first place.

Before asmallnotch points out that this is what happened to socialism, I’ll point it out myself. ;-)

Sometimes I feel like I’m on a roller coaster and want to jump off but can’t.

I really loved the founders of this nation – I think they worked really hard to balance the necessity for government against individual liberty. Well, they didn’t get it 100 percent correct but they got it closer than any human culture prior.

But we’ve done nothing but shit on that legacy and bastardize everything they stood for. Now – I feel like what I’ve stood for my entire life – and what I still stand for – is really not worth that much it’s just “better” than the alternative out there.

And … I can’t give her up because she’s the only thing allowing our survival right now – yet the longer she lives, the more and more bastardized she becomes.

It’s probably a futile game and it’ll come undone with or without my help. But – I can’t give up because I’m not a quitter – even though maybe I should be.

Whatever, I just hope God’s will be done and he casts me the circumstances that I must deal with – that we all must deal with. Because, right now – I really don’t know what the fuck to do other than to keep chugging down the line here.

[…] also ready Randy Barnett’s annotated version, Thomas Fleming about the country we were, and Maggie McNeill on how we have fallen from those days. And you can cap it off at Popehat, with an inspiring story […]

While Washington was still alive and before Jefferson became president, we were already violating the principles we pride ourselves on. The second president, John Adams, was throwing people in the Big House for bad-mouthing him, and you can find examples right up through the nation’s history. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the internment of the Nisei to the Red Scare to the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act to signature strikes, we have never been quite what the Founders and Framers wanted us to be.

So when I hear (or read) about how things are lower than ever, how the nation has degenerated, how we’re on our way out, how the US is as good as dead and basically just waiting to fall over, I don’t buy it. Because we’ve ALWAYS been as good as dead and basically just waiting to fall over. No, I don’t like the way we keep abdicating our freedoms out of fear, or curtailing free speech for the sake of “decency,” or a host of other things. But those things are nothing new. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Comstock and McCarthy.

Maggie on Twitter

Boring but necessary legal stuff

All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say "pretty please with sugar on top" first, and then wait for me to say "okey-dokey".